Good To See

That Redhat does not rush new versions into official release status. Canonical and especially SuSE have done lots of damage by releasing immature Linux distros.

Linux has always been about reliability and I give a fsck about new features which are not stable. And the same is with that horrible KDE Desktop. Serious users expect players like Canonical and SuSE to be conservative in terms of new features and always err on the side of quality and reliability.

Beta stuff should never be part of a release. And if you have nothing new to release, don't yield to the temptation to mess up a distro with the latest crap.

I prefer a rock-solid five-year old GUI over a windoze-looking and buggy hairball any time and I think most other Linux people do that too. FAIL for SuSE !

Novell has done damage from different angles too

Problem with SuSE enterpise is not new versions of software, it is lack of good will within community (or what left of it). SuSE enterprise does not ship new software, it is first tested through OpenSuSE like RHEL is tested through Fedora. But problem is that Novell effectively nuked the community with their behaviour. First Micrsoft deal, then pushing Mono and advertising how SuSE is protected by Microsoft... People left OpenSuSE. And now SuSE enterprise can ship 5 year old software, it still wouldn't work well because there are no a lot of people to report bugs and help out, and those who are around are not willing to help. Some of them are even having fun with sending fake bug reports. Key thing with FLOSS is trust and good will, and there is none of that left for Novell any more. What goes around comes around.

Recently, OpenSuSE community asked for more independence from Novell, but it is way to late for that.

Ret Hat on the other hand, does almost everything right. They know how FLOSS works, they have Cygnus veterans in their company. They understand what nurturing community is as important as Wall Street (if not more). No wonder that RHEL rock and Red Hat is growing fast while Novell is about to get bought.